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You exercise your body to stay physically in shape, so why shouldn't you exercise your brain to stay mentally fit? With these daily exercises you will learn how to flex your mind, improve your creativity and boost your memory. As with any exercise, repetition is necessary for you to see improvement, so pick your favorite exercises from our daily suggestions and repeat them as desired. Try to do some mentalrobics every single day!

People tend to quickly classify a situation, which causes them to think and respond in predictable ways. A creative thinker will think about situations from different perspectives. Try this group exercise to get people thinking about things in different ways.

1. Pass out three cards to everyone in the group and ask them to write down a different problem statement on each card.
2. Shuffle the cards and pass out two cards to each person, putting the remainder in the middle of the table. If anyone gets his own card or one he dislikes, he should exchange it for a new one from the pile in the middle.
3. People should now pair up and synthesize their four problem statements into one new one. Present this to the group.
4. The group should now come up with one new problem statement that incorporates the best parts of everything that has been presented.

This exercise is a good way to gain understanding of the problem and what directions the group should take to solve it.

The reason that people need to sleep remains mostly a mystery, but many scientists believe that memory consolidation is part of it. Memory consolidation is the process by which recent memories are strengthened into long term memories. It is believed that memories are stored in the hippocampus for a short time, and that they are transferred to the cortex as part of consolidation.

An important thing to take away from this is that sleep reinforces learning. If you sleep after learning some material, you will remember it better than if you did not sleep. Thus, it is not advisable to study and take an exam on the same day. If you can sleep in between, the memories will have a chance to become consolidated and you will have better recall.